Morphological and Molecular Diversity in Durum Wheat (Triticum DurumDesf.) Landraces of North Shewa

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Date

1999-05

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Addis Ababa University

Abstract

Morphological and molecular diversity study and the associated ethnobotanical profile of durum wheat landraces (farmers' varieties) of North Shewa have been undertaken in this study. Morphological diversity stndy on thirteen durnm wheat popnlations (381 genotypes) ,collected earlier by the Biodiversity Conservation and Research Institute from five awrajas and ten weredas of North Shewa region, was conducted using six heritable qualitative traits. The diversity was estimated using Shannon Weaver diversity index (H'). H' was estimated for each population, wereda, awraja and altitudinal class and the entire collection. On population basis H' is lowest at Basona Warena wereda (0.25 ± 0.08) and highest at Kimbibit Wereda (0.65 ± 0.16). On awraja basis H' ranged from (0.50 ± 0.03) in Gam Midir to (0.73 ± 0.10) in Selale. On altitudinal basis, the third altitudinal class (2401-2600 m.a.s.l.) sc ored the highest H' (0.78). The diversity index for the study area is very high (0.79 ± 0.08). On character basis seed color showed the highest H' (0.97). Only glume pubescence was conspicuously unique to specific awmja and altitudinal class. A high diversity of the crop is also observed from the ethnobotany study. A total of twenty-five different farmers' varieties having different vernacular names were recorded. The environmental, social (cultural) and economic factors were identified by the farmer as factors for maintaining the existing diversity. The different varieties have important merits in agronomy, disease resistance, traditional use values and so on. Farmers have their own folk taxonomy system for identifying and classifying their varieties. The Randomly Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) molecular technique with a gluten-coding single primer system with the following sequence, { 5'- ATG AAG ACC TTC CTC GTC TT- 3'} { 5'-AAC GCC GAA TGG CAC ACT A- 3' } showed good demonstration of the inter-population diversity of the thirteen populations. Except three populations, all the rest showed diffel'ent banding patterns with different base pair fmgments for the same primer used. Generally the whole study confirmed the existence of strikingly high diversity of durum wheat in the study area and underlines the role of the indigenous knowledge of farmers for the existing diversity. Key words: Wheat, Triticum dUrlIm, landraces (fanners' varieties), diversity index (H') Morphological traits, ethnobotany, RAPD.

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Keywords

Wheat, Triticum dUrlIm, landraces (fanners varieties), diversity index (H'), Morphological traits, ethnobotany, RAPD

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